Red Dragon Infodump

Note: Post is heavily work in progress right now, it’s only public in order to get feedback and error correction more easily. Please let me know if information here is wrong or confusing.

I won’t publicize the post through Twitter until it’s in an overall better state.

Note that some info in this post is still really volatile and may turn out to be wrong later. I’ll try to correct it but I may end up missing stuff..

Red Dragon Raid: The Crimson Castle Crusher

Winged Dragon Guardian of the Fortress #2

Phase 0

Not a lot to say about this phase. You’ll have to fight your way through a few waves of Omega’s demons while the dragon bombards you with flame attacks. Compared to other raids, this phase is over really quickly.

Phase 1

The Erythron Dragon will fly back and upon landing will stand perfectly still as it uses various flame attacks. At this stage, it has no actual weak points however its toes have the lowest resistance to damage overall. So for now, you’re just beating on its toes with whatever attacks you can.

Phase 1.5

Eventually, smashing its toes will cause Erythron Dragon to flinch, at which point Laconium Swords start spawning.

The dragon’s chest will begin to glow blue. This is a guard point which can be broken to reveal a weak-point. Once broken, it\ll glow bright orange. This mechanic is key to the rest of the fight.

It seems any attack can actually break these guard points, but by far the best way to do it is to land a charged Photon Art with a Laconium Sword as it’ll break it in one hit (regardless of how much damage it actually does).

During this phase, once you break its chest weakpoint one of its wings will become targetable. Break the guard-point on it and do as much damage as you can before it flies off and starts the next phase.

Laconium Sword

There will always be 3 Laconium Swords available (until the final phase), as whenever someone’s sword breaks, times out or is unequipped a new one spawns in its place.

Laconium Swords function much like a vehicle or turret, in that it has stats independent of your own as well as its own attacks. Laconium Sword only has 3 actions, however; a regular attack that sends out a shockwave, a photon art and a guard.

The regular attack does decent damage and has an enormous reach, making it a reliable way to attack the boss if your regular attacks are difficult to use.

The photon art is a chargeable attack, with slightly different functions for un-charged and charged. The uncharged version does a small amount of damage but homes in to whatever you’re locked on to quickly and from considerably distance. The charged version do a lot of damage and does home in a little but not nearly as much as the uncharged one.

Guard functions just like guarding with a Hunter weapon, except it can block attacks from any angle and seems to have a considerably longer Just-Guard window. Laconium Swords are quite fragile, so it’ll help to get used to guarding with it.

Phase 2

For this phase you’ll need to use the cannons. Shoot out any of the meteors that fly your way as if any hit you you’ll be knocked off your cannon. For the first few flybys this isn’t too much of an issue but you’ll need to stay on for the next part.

After a while, Erythron Dragon will stop and charge up a really big meteor. You’ll need to shoot the large meteor while also defending your cannon from waves of smaller meteors it’ll fire at you. On doing enough damage, the meteor will explode and Erythron Dragon will land on the wall. Otherwise, it’ll fire the meteor and do a massive amount of raid-wide damage (though you can block/dodge this attack).

Once landed, you’ll need to do as much damage as you can to whichever wing is vulnerable. If you break one wing you should move on to the next, break its guard point and do as much damage as you can. If you do enough, you’ll break that wing too and it’ll move on to the next phase, otherwise you’ll have another round of meteors to deal with.

Phase 3

In my opinion, it’s not a good idea to target the head while other points can be attacked, as from this point on Erythron Dragon becomes very mobile, with its head being its fastest moving part. Instead, prioritize attacking its legs or tail if they’re up as breaking them will stun the boss and allow you to freely attack its head.

Phase 4

Everybody gets a sword

Atra Series Trade

A new exchange was added to Zieg that lets you turn your Val weapons into Atra weapons as well as exchanging Atra weapons for other Atra weapons. Be aware that you can only have 1 Atra weapon per account, mind.

It should be noted for that last point that this includes S4 abilities, which could be really useful if you want to obtain a different weapon’s S4 (either for build reasons or because the one your weapon has by default is kind of crap).

So Are They Good?

Well the Atra weapons are so far the weakest 14-star weapons in the game, with a pretty limp potential to boot. They still have more attack than any 13-star however and the S-class ability system allows you to customize the weapons in an entirely unique way.

Now, unfortunately I’m terrible at using the damage calculator myself so I’m refraining from doing my own calculations as they may be inaccurate. However if the results in this calculation (by Mr Chills over at PSO-World) are any indicator it’d seem that if you use the 2% damage boost that Val Gunslash provides as its S1 ability then an Atra weapon just about matches a Nemesis NT weapon. That’s pretty respectable, seeing as Nemesis (and Slave too really) are both far and away the best 13-stars in the game but clearly it seems they’re outperformed by drop-only 14-star weapons for the most part. That seems fair to me, honestly.

That said, the functionality you could gain with the right combination of S-class abilities could well out-strip the slight power difference between Atra and other 14-stars. It’s something to keep in mind, in any case.

The jury’s still out on Val weapons and whether they’re worth using for anything other than feeding into an Atra weapon for now.

S-Class Abilities

Introduced with the Val and Atra series weapons (and later with the Sungod-NT weapons) is a brand new affixing system where you’re essentially building your own weapon potential. It’s really nothing like anything we’ve had yet and it’s early days so I haven’t really got an opinion on it yet. I just hope this isn’t a brand new system that’s going to be used once or twice then forgotten about forever and I also hope that they do something about Unit affixing some day seeing as this is the 2nd new system for weapons…

Each of these S-Class Abilities occupy a specific “slot”, marked by “S1” to “S4”.

You can only have one of a given kind of S-class ability per weapon (so only one S1 for example).

Weapons display which abilities they can have socketed into them

Val series weapons can have S1, S2 and S3

Atra series weapons can have S1, S2, S3 and S4.

They always transfer at 100%, even when up-slotting!

Getting an S-Class Ability

There’s two ways to get these abilities. One is exactly the same way you get a Special Ability Factor; you get a weapon to +35 and either use that ability on the weapon itself or use it to pass that ability to another weapon (which of course consumes it in the process).

The other is by the ability being on an item that drops, in fact there are a number of S-class abilities that can only be obtained via drops.

Unlike Special Ability Factors however, the S-Class ability can be re-applied to the weapon any number of times.

Note to search for these abilities on the player shop, you need to include “S#:” at the start of the term, where # is the slot number. For example, “輝勢の恵” would be “S1:輝勢の恵”.

* Recovers HP every 40 seconds. Operates on a separate timer from the equivalent S2 ability and stacks with it. The timer starts counting whenever you are below maximum HP (same as Summoner HP Restorate).

S4 Abilities

S4 abilities are so far unique to Atra weapons and are unlocked in the same way you unlock S1-3. However, once unlocked you can actually transfer them to a different weapon through Zieg’s exchange, which is handy if you want another weapon’s S4 ability or the one on the weapon you want is kind of lame.

Sword – Restore PP on Just-Guard (+10pp on recovery?)

Wired Lance – One time per quest, protect the user from a lethal hit (you’ll keep 1 hp)?

* The amount is based on the formula (maxPP – 120) * 0.1. This number is applied to passive regen, active regen and PP cost reduction. For example, 150 PP would be (150 – 120) * 0.1 = 30 * 0.1 = 3. Every 10 PP above 120 will grant 1%.** Boosts the effectiveness of off-element by 25% (additive), so it ends up being 50% instead of 25% of the weapon’s attribute as a damage bonus. Jury’s still out on this one. This means you only need one Atra rod (which is just as well given you can only get the one)

You’ll notice that Summoner is left out right now, apparently they’ll be getting something later on. To hazard a guess, it’ll be some gimmick around 14* pets whenever they arrive.

New 14* Weapons

New raid these days means new flavors of unobtanium to chase! But are they any good? Unfortunately, it’s too early to tell but their potentials at least attempt to keep up the trend of the drop-only 14*s being gameplay changing in some way which is cool.

Dual Bird (Twin Machineguns)

Potential: Successfully dodging or S-rolling an attack activates a buff that restores PP. The effect is cancelled if you take damage.

While the buff can be activated by Hero you still need to Reload to gain PP back. Details are sketchy on this one.

It sounds like the buff has infinite duration as long as you don’t get hit

Gilde Girola (Partizan)

Potential: Restores PP while guarding. While gear is full, midair Partizan attacks will consume no gear.

It boosts damage dealt by 9%.

The PP regen functions a bit like Hero Twin-Machinegun’s Just-Reload in that it rapidly regenerates PP.

The regen speed is rumoured to be better than Orbit.

Gear Experience (Knuckle)

Potential: Summons a giant fist to crush your enemies every time you successfully dodge n attack with Knuckle’s weapon action.

The fist it summons is similar to the one Meteor Fist can when RNG favors you. It does some decent damage at that if this tweet is anything to go by.

5 thoughts on “Red Dragon Infodump”

From what little I’ve seen of it, yeah. I don’t really PVP much so at best I can only check it out and comment a bit. There’s other things I’d like to talk about too but this post is just gonna be the Red Dragon stuff.

Pretty late, but the Laconium Sword lets you get around very easily if you’re smart about it. Uncharged slash lets you cross about half the stage, and if you aim high with the slash PA then use the normal air attack in conjunction with dodging, it basically lets you fly around. Really handy to move around and target the Dragon from various angles, not to mention dodging most of its salvos.